A popular board game introduced many years ago goes by the name of Pictionary™. In this game teams of players compete against each other by having one member of the team manually draw an object (which could be a person, place, thing, action, etc.) while the other members of the team attempt to guess the identity of the object. A time factor is also accounted for in that the team must determine the object within a certain time period.
Pictionary™ is one form of pictorial game that has enjoyed great success in the market, but it has not been rendered into a form suitable for Internet accessibility. One example of a drawing game that has been implemented in electronic form is depicted in US Publication No. 2007/0018393, incorporated by reference herein. It is apparent that there is a need for other similar types of games with different rules, objectives that can be enjoyed in electronic form, and particularly on sites available on the Internet (including social network sites) and other hand held devices (including advanced phones).
CAPTCHAs (Completely Automatic Public Turing Tests To Tell Humans And Computers Apart) are well-known for controlling access to computers and resources on the Internet. A recent example by Sanghavi et al. (US Publication No. 2009/0113294) incorporated by reference herein demonstrates the use of a progressive CAPTCHA. The use of a progressive technique increases the cost to spammers seeking to use human capital to circumvent text based CAPTCHAs.
While Sanghavi et al propose their approach for conventional (distorted) text type challenges, they fail to appreciate the potential for image based challenges. In particular, recognition of images can be incorporated as part of a picture based game to develop appropriate challenges, unlike text approaches.